(LifeSiteNews) — In Germany, there is currently a debate about whether someone who, contrary to Article 1 of the Basic Law, calls into question the fundamental right of every human being to their own life (from conception to natural death) is suitable to be a judge at the German Federal Constitutional Court.
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Even Catholic bishops have shied away from a clear yes to life by placing the political parties’ struggle for power in the state above their apostolic witness to “the truth of the Gospel” (Gal 2:14), which is, after all, the sole reason for their existence. Jesus, from Whom all authority of the apostles and bishops as their successors emanates, had formulated the guideline for how His Church should behave toward legitimate political authority in response to the Pharisees’ trick question: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Mt 22:21).
But Jesus Himself shows the representative of state omnipotence that this is anything but a cheap compromise that makes possible the coexistence of the Christian faith with the idolization of a totalitarian state power (the Roman imperial cult) and an atheistic ideology (the so-called “peace priests” in communist states or the “German Christians” in Nazi Germany).
Pilate is the epitome of the usurped power of humans to be masters over the life and death of their fellow human beings and the archetype of the claimed competence of skeptics and relativists over truth and its (alleged) dependence on the interests of the powerful. Pilate boasts of his “power” (John 19:10) to release or crucify Jesus. And he mocks the unity of God and Christ, His Son, Who is truth personified and the salvation of mankind. For Jesus revealed Himself, in the face of all absolute claims to power by humans and the cynical manipulations of the question of truth, as a “king” whose sovereignty does not consist in exploiting His people and instrumentalizing them for His own interests. Rather, He is king in the sense of the good shepherd Who lays down His life for His sheep (Jn 10:11), just as bishops and priests should be good shepherds after the heart of Jesus.
In contrast to the cynical despiser of truth in favor of political power, Jesus testifies to the truth of God: “Yes, I am a king. I was born for this, and I came into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (John 19:37). Knowing full well that they will be “dragged before courts and prisons for the name of Jesus” and handed over to the brutal violence of “kings and governors” (Luke 21:12), “Peter and the apostles” confess, recommending themselves to the pope and bishops as their successors for imitation: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
They deny any human authority (the state, the judiciary, the military, their own nation and tradition, philosophy and science, and especially all totalitarian ideologies) the right to forbid them or restrict them from “teaching in the name of Jesus” (Acts 5:28), “Whom you crucified and Whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 4:10): “For there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
The entire 2000-year history of the Church teaches us that the Church’s mission to serve God as “the universal sacrament of salvation for the world in Christ” (Lumen gentium 1; 48; Gaudium et spes 45) has always been obscured or even betrayed when bishops have served or even bowed to the interests of the powerful.
The difference between a good shepherd and a hireling becomes apparent when a bishop does not see himself as a civil servant until retirement, but as a servant of Christ until martyrdom. The current formula for this (typically German) misunderstanding of the Church, which prefers to legitimize itself as an organization useful to the state rather than as coming from Christ, is: We must proclaim the truths of natural moral law and God’s historical self-revelation only very quietly, so that the neo-Gnostic ideologues of self-redemption do not feel offended and so that we are not instrumentalized by the wrong, i.e., the non-Marxist, side in the power struggle between the political parties.
This fear of the political instrumentalization of Christian truth, however, seeks the applause of the wrong political side, which is anti-Christian precisely because it subjects the truth of the Gospel to the calculations of political power. Nor is it the task of the Church to protect the constitution of a state, which is the task of its own organs. Instead, the Church has a duty, whether convenient or inconvenient, to proclaim the Gospel and defend the dignity of every human being, whoever threatens it. A state can only be called a constitutional state if it actually respects universal human rights and does not merely claim them for itself rhetorically and propagandistically. A Catholic bishop has the authority of God to oppose all atheistic anthropologies and extremely anti-Christian ideologies, even to the point of white and red martyrdom, which trample on the truth of the unconditional right of human beings to life and deny the revealed truth of the inviolable dignity of every human being in the image and likeness of God.
The vigilance of the good shepherd is called for when post- and transhumanism, disguised in the social Darwinist sheep’s clothing, come along so gently as representatives of self-determination and autonomy – but of the strong over the weak.
To claim that human beings and their dignity only begin at birth is simply thoughtlessness, the kind that can only spring from the empty head of an ideologue and the ice-cold heart of terrible lawyers who, bound only to the letter of the law and not its spirit, begin and end with the interpretation of legal paragraphs and not with the flesh and blood of living human beings. The human being who is born is the same person who was carried under his mother’s heart for nine months and who was conceived by his parents physically (and hopefully also in love) and who, theologically speaking, was created in God’s image and likeness and was already chosen by God, called, and predestined for eternal salvation in view of his historical existence.
In order not to be co-opted in the battle between political parties, which do not shy away from defaming their opponents as left-wing extremists or right-wing extremists, the bishops must not betray the truth of Christ simply to avoid being pushed under by the woke mainstream and framed as conservative or even right-wing in a media campaign. This is the “sickness unto death” of Catholicism in Germany, which has been brushed with foolish woke-ness, that its pseudo-synodal paths are more “inspired” by Judith Butler than by Edith Stein, more by Karl Marx than by Johann Adam Möhler and John Henry Newman, more by Michel Foucault than by Henri de Lubac.
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Its misguided path began when the truth of the Gospel was subjected to a hermeneutic of “humanism without God,” which misuses the findings of modern natural, human, and social sciences to refute, relativize, and correct the truth revealed by God about man, his origin, and his destination.
As teachers of the Catholic faith, bishops must not play along with people who do not share or even reject the doctrine of man’s image of God. Every variant of social Darwinism is radically anti-Christian. This is the position that says: whoever prevails in the struggle for life is right and defines it. Some even consider it a form of higher humanity when, in their judgment, “lives unworthy of life,” i.e., the disabled and undesirable before and after birth, or even ideological opponents (class enemies or racially inferior people of other faiths) are “eliminated and disposed of” in order to avoid future suffering or to avoid from the outset (in communist terms) “pests of society” and (in Nazi jargon) “useless eaters.”
However, anyone who recognizes the fundamental right of every human being to life and bodily integrity, based on his or her spiritual and physical nature, and derives the ultimate criteria for the image of humanity from the revealed word of God, can never find a justifiable reason to kill an innocent human being. Weighing the mother’s right to self-determination against her child’s right to life is nothing more than a diabolical illusion that obscures the truth that one person’s right to self-determination ends where another person’s right to life begins. The rights of the mother and father toward their child consist precisely in protecting and nurturing the child and raising him or her to be a responsible person with a conscience. A state that usurps and restricts parental rights is nothing more than a totalitarian monster that devours its offspring and is the stark opposite of a democratic state that serves the common good and is based on the fundamental rights of every citizen.
Bishops can free themselves from the dilemma between the required fidelity to the Gospel and their self-inflicted dependence on ideological and political power struggles in one fell swoop if they find firm ground again in Vatican II and thus end the confusion in the Church’s doctrine of faith and morals.
And this is the Magna Carta of the cultural struggle of life against death, which the barbarism of atheistic and anti-humanistic ideologies has caused in the 20th century and continues to cause today:
Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator. (Gaudium et spes, 27)
This leads to the following insight: The child’s right to life is far more important than the parents’ right to self-determination. We must think from the perspective of the child’s life and not from the needs and interests of those who stand in his way and violently take his life. The right to self-determination is about freedom from external control, which I must also grant to others. Children are entrusted to their parents for the purpose of education. Parents, however, are not masters of the life and death of their own children.
The Catholic Church advocates the unconditional right to life of the unborn, the born, the healthy and the sick, the young and the old throughout the world. It cannot make its commitment to fundamental human rights dependent on the favor and ideologically driven legal opinions of those in power in each country, nor can it allow itself to be intimidated by brainwashers and opinion makers of various stripes. It must be prophetic, courageous, and free, but also critically constructive in influencing the conscience and legal opinions of all citizens. Unborn children cannot cry out against the injustice done to them by the murder of their lives. Nor are they in a position to hold their tormentors to account later, although the latter will not escape God’s judgment. But this is one of the most important tasks of Catholic bishops: to stand up for the weak, even if they are personally slandered by ideologues and power-hungry politicians. “Open your mouth for the voiceless, for the rights of all who are weak” (Book of Proverbs 31:8).
